Great to hear youíve managed to solve the problem but best read this to make sure is doesn't happen again.

By coincidence, I had a Compaq Vista laptop in the shop this week with exactly the same problem of the Recovery Partition going into the red.

I did almost what I suggested you try but with the variation that I backed up the Recovery Partition for safety sake and then deleted the contents of the original Partition completely (yes, we did have the 3 DVDs). This worked fine but when checking it again a couple of days later, guess what? It had started to fill up again, with 5 GB of HP diagnostic tools! It looks to me that, out of nowhere, HP support has started to churn out some tool updates for Vista and missed the point that they will overload the size of the Recovery Partition. Iím not surprised - little good appears to come out of HP support these days.

To prevent this problem coming back to your system again my advice is to go into Control Panel > Programs and Features, and remove the HP updater program completely Ė itís no use to man or beast now anyway and that will kill the little varmint off.

As general maintenance, Iíd also download these two tools (from some cleaver Brit programmers) to keep your system running cleanly:
CCleaner, which is very safe and only does good (but donít use the registry cleaner section as such things are always the work of the devil!)http://www.filehippo.com/download_cc...b2739d320e3c8/

The Following User Says Thank You to Chris Cooper For This Useful Post:

Thanks Chris. Will follow your advice to the T (that's american meaning that I will follow everything that you said). You've been a big help and I do appreciate it. Ccleaner will be my next project. This is fun to me. Thanks again and take care.

"Oh and PaulT probably found out his little gem (which was new to me too) by reading forums [/QUOTE

I have known about diskmgmt.msc on and off over several years and only found it each time through the forums. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in magazines, ever. There may be several other useful snipets like diskmgt but we wouldn't know about them unless mentioned here. If there are, could some kind soul write them up in the forum?

I use lots of those "shortcuts" because I can never remember where to find them in Control Panel etc. The easiest way to find them is to search the Windows directory for *.msc or *.cpl. You'll find a lot of Control Panel applets - and you can't break anything by running them, only by changing stuff in them.

I have known about diskmgmt.msc on and off over several years and only found it each time through the forums. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in magazines, ever. There may be several other useful snipets like diskmgt but we wouldn't know about them unless mentioned here.

I usually just right-click Computer, My Computer, This PC [depending on the version of Windows] and choose Manage, gives much more than Disk Management. One can find Device Manager in the Control Panel in Win7 and Win8, can't recall on WinVista as I don't have one running just now. Device Manager should list Disk Drives.